In the following essay, Kingsbury investigates the role of self-restraint in “The Return.”

Alvan Hervey, protagonist of Conrad's 1897 story “The Return,” tells his estranged wife that “Self-restraint is everything in life.”1 And in much of Conrad's work, restraint is the key to personal decency and social stability. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow reminds us that Kurtz's lack of restraint functions as a primary factor in his downfall. But restraint itself becomes the key to Hervey's downfall. Crushed when he discovers that his wife of five years has almost left him for a poet and editor with large teeth, a “rank outsider” of “no class at all” (147-48), Hervey thinks only of maintaining appearances, a criticism Marlow levels at the manager who accompanies...